These kinds of stories always fascinate me. A dog is lost, 120 km from home, and eventually reappears in its home town, having apparently forded a major river and a mountain range to get there. Everyone has heard accounts like this before, and they're immortalized in literature. One of the best known tales, The Incredible Journey is a huge favourite with children, who seem to resonate strongly to accounts of critters surmounting incredible odds to find their way home. Perhaps such stories speak to the deep human fear of losing home. It's right up there as one of the archetypal forms of human suffering. Just ask Ulysses.
But here's what's even more interesting to me. If you read the story closely, you notice that the dog found its way over vast and difficult terrain back to its hometown, but then showed up at someone else's house in Ely, Nevada, the town where its owner lived. Ely is not that big. The dog, according to the report, was not injured. So why couldn't he find his way to his own house? Is it possible that dogs sometimes get just as lost in the built environment as we do?
I've always wanted to find some way to study this problem. Perhaps now with gadgets such as this, I'll be able to (though anyone who outfits their pooch with one of these things is not very likely to let it get lost in the first place).
The thing about lost dogs is that they don't often look lost to me. They look as though they know exactly where they're going. Perhaps we've lost them, but they know exactly where they are!
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